At Home in Utopia

In the 1920s, hundreds of Jewish garment workers undertook an amazing experiment: fleeing the claustrophobic and harsh environment of tenement life, they built four large cooperative apartment complexes amidst the greenery of the Bronx. This passionate documentary focuses on one of the buildings, the United Workers Cooperative Colony ("the coops"), a house for Communist Jews. Among the film's interviews with various children who came of age in the coops is architect Daniel Libeskind. These owners developed an apartment complex for over seven hundred families and invited black families to join them because they felt their community was too white.